JUL

20

Tommy here, I'm doing a blog post for the first time in like 8 months. That's because I've taken up a new hobby. It's called moving into a place, then moving out like a month later. I wouldn't recommend it. Anyway, here are some updates.

A Steam update just went up that fixed the chapter upload bug. A few fans helped me track this bug since I couldn't duplicate any of the problems people were having. Everyone should thank them for that, but their names escape me now and I can't open Skype to see who they were. They know who they are...so thanks! So, now everyone that couldn't upload a chapter, knock yourself out!

DEC

20

So Christmas is coming up. My family doesn't celebrate the Jesus version of Christmas, we celebrate the awesome give toys and stuff to people...which I think is better. Must have been hard on Jesus to have a birthday so close to Christmas...probably why he acted out and got in trouble with those Romans. Poor guy, he just wanted attention...

Anyways, Christmas time means sales and there is an insane of a sale going on at your local Steam Store. They've basically discounted everything including us. We're currently 75% off right now selling for $3.75. That's insane and it will pay off nicely for our little SMB community because the more people that play, the more chance awesome levels will be made when the editor launches in the coming weeks. It's a very exciting time. If you haven't already, go gift a copy of SMB. $3.75 and you will be a hero to your friends.

AWARDS!!!!!!!!

Also Gamespot JUST awarded us Best Downloadable Game of 2010. I THINK this is a trophy, but I'm not sure. I saw some Gamespot trophys at an office I was at this weekend. Gamespot is fucking awesome!! Praise them with praise.

DEC

10

So, admittedly, our Steam launch was a little rough. Developing on PC is tough, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I have 8 testing computers in my house ranging from an Integrated Intel Graphics slow netbook, to a quad core monster and they all run the game fine...the netbook even boasts 60FPS on several levels and is fully playable. It's frustrating that I can't replicate the majority of bugs people have, but I do what I can. Anyway, I just want to thank you all for baring with me as we get through these bugs. Sending in Save Games, system specs, screenshots, etc...they are all very helpful. I apologize for all the bugs and I know they are frustrating. As frustrating as they are to you, they are more frustrating to me, and here's the proof:

This keyboard used to have all its keys, it is my mac's keyboard...and my mac is my whipping boy. It's been known to get smacked in frustration, or violently pushed off the desk, or thrown full force at a wall....this is why I can't have nice things.... (most of the keys that are left are there because I found them after recently cleaning the apartment).

ANYWAYS, I wanted to go over some recent updates, offer some how tos and explanations.

Custom Controls:
You can now customize the controls of Meatboy himself. This customization only applies to Meat Boy since it's the most important aspect of the game. There is a file in the install directory called "buttonmap.cfg" (It was buttoMmap.cfg when I first uploaded it...I was quite tired). So it works like this. There are two sections in the file, keyboard and gamepad. You can set the movement, jump, and special / run keys to anything you like (within reason) through this file. So you lefties that wanted WASD, here you go. The config file is case sensitive, so just make sure its all lower case. Some buttons that do not have alphanumeric represtation have special names like:

Enter: return
Left Shift: shift
Right Shift: rshift
Space: space
Left Control: control
Right Control: rcontrol

You can only bind an action to one key.

For Joysticks you can customize the jump and special / run buttons by putting in the button number. For instance, the default is set to 1 and 3, which correspond to A and X on the Xbox 360 gamepad. 1 and 3 correspond to the equivalent of B and Y on Logitech controllers. To look up the button numbers for a gamepad (if they aren't written on the buttons) just go to Control Panel and look at the Game Pad properties.

There is another option called useanalog. This is set to true by default. This property allows the game to use the joystick as the dpad. If you are experiencing weirdness, set this to false and it will disable it.

Note: These controls only affect Meat Boy, Menu's are hard coded with controls.

Crashes and Slowdown:

I've worked non-stop this week trying to address all of our support emails, if I didn't answer you it was because I was working on your problem and haven't had a chance to respond. I do read all emails though and respond to as many as possible. Anyway, a few known fixes for stuff.

This should be fixed now, but some users were experiencing EXTREMELY slow load times when running full screen. I did find where this could be happening and did fix it on the one computer we could replicate it on. If the problem persists, you can force -windowed at the command line and you should no longer have the problem.

For slowdown in general, we've had some reports of conflicting programs. My sisters laptop, which is nicer than my netbook, still runs the game slower than my netbook due to all of the anti-virus and other crap she has running. We had one instance today where someone's gamma correction program that sets the gamma every so many seconds was causing the game to stutter, disabling that program caused his game to run fine. So yea basic stuff like that will help.

Crashes on startup seem to be rare now, but a few people are reporting that the game is trying to force a refresh rate that it cannot handle. If this happens, force windowed mode with -windowed.

We've had one or two instances of computers crashing during gameplay with a seemingly impossible error message. I'm collecting system specs for this error in order to try to diagnose it. The error is basically referencing D3DVertexBuffer.cpp. If this happens, PLEASE, email me your specs, operating system, EVERYTHING. You can't possibly give me too much information on this error. It seems to be very rare, I've had one report on a system below required specs, and one report on a computer with better specs than my dev machine.

So yea, those are the important things. Here's a list of stuff fixed:

-Achievements now award on load insuring that you do not lose achievements for not being online or other reasons
-Flywrench was overwriting Jill's warps and vice versa. This is fixed now.
-We added DarkWorld Ironman achievements. We've tested them all and they do work, do remember that you need to beat darkworld levels without beating any warp or light world levels to get them.
-Leaderboard were not working properly, not showing correct rankings, not showing friends scores, not showing your scores, etc. We fixed this a few updates ago.
-We locked Mr. Minecraft out of saving, uploading to leaderboards, and getting achievements. He's god.

Update for 12/10

This update has not dropped yet, it contains three fixes and attempted error trapping for the Render setup to track down more errors. It should be up at some point today:

-Added keyboard controls for the replays menu
-Fixed a bug where Meat Ninja disappeared when a game was reloaded with him unlocked
-Fixed a bug where percentages would add up to 107%...the max is 106%.

There are other one offs and crash fixes we implemented. I'm fading right now...watching Teen Wolf...and for some reason craving a hard boiled egg...and I hate hard boiled eggs...so I'm gunna go now.

You guys are all great, thank you again for being patient with us. You're all awesome. Oh, by the way, we will be adding Steam Cloud support in the future.

DEC

01

It's been quite a busy night/day. I woke up at around 5PM (after going to bed at 1PM) to some people having some issues with Super Meat Boy. This was expected, and I expected today to be a sort of hellish day. So let me just cut to the chase.

The Steam Update is uploading as I write this post, it should go live sometime later in the day after it gets pushed to the production servers. This build addresses the following issues:

- CRASH ON STARTUP Several Users reported crashes on Startup. An early version of the Steam Install Script got uploaded by me that didn't fully run DirectX, also I'm not sure I had all the proper prerequisites packed in the build. Either way, I have packed in everything that should be needed for DX, as well as updated the install script. Those who have already installed the game, I'm not sure this will help you...but if you are experiencing crashes on load after you have downloaded the update. Simply Click Here and run the DirectX Web Installer.

- CRASHING DURING GAMPLAY AFTER ABOUT 3 LEVELS There was an error where save games weren't saving, mainly because a folder was missing in the installer, not sure why it got made on some builds and not others, but it was the problem. This would cause grabbing bandage girl to crash at random times as well as initial runs of the game to crash. Those of you that had problems with the game starting even after the install of DirectX, this could have been your problem. This issue has been (As long as the update makes the folder) resolved.

- STUCK RESOLUTIONS / INVALID MONITOR INPUT Users would get stuck in resolutions that their monitors would not display. Not sure what is causing this because I look at what the monitor can display, but either way I made a work around. Users can now force resolution and window settings to get the game to a working state where they can adjust them further. The commands are as follows:

With windowed and fullscreen options, the game will default to the last res that was tried, valid or no..so if you are having problems I recommend following the steps below to fix it. (I'm sure the majority of you know how to do this, but for those that don't see below).

Go to Library, then Right Click on Super Meat Boy and go to Properties

Click on Set Launch Options

Fill in the options starting with dashes and separated by spaces in the text field

-NO BROWNIE OR DR FETUS BOSSES I'm a moron and forgot to upload the boss files for Dr. Fetus and Brownie. Players would play their stages and see no bosses. I uploaded them now, they are in.

-MENU CRASHES There were some menu bugs, mainly with the pause menu and the character select menu in game. These have been fixed

PERFORMANCE ISSUES

We have scaled the textures best we can. There are 3 modes available to the command line. The gamedoes a miniprofile thing that determines what resolution and texture detail you should be running at...but sometimes this can be wrong. To help adjust performance issues you have 3 options:

-lowdetail runs fine on a netbook. I have an Asus Aspire One. 1.6Ghz Intel Atom, 1GB Ram, Integrated Intel GMA 950 inside. If I switch on low detail, the game maintains a 50-60fps for most levels. It is very playable with extremely small load times. My computer here, with an NVidia 260, Q6600 Quad Core, 6GB Ram runs the game at like 400FPS Un-VSynced. So that's basically you're range. Those are the two computers I had available during development, so they represent high end and low end.

Speaking of VSync, the game needs to be V Synced. I can't stress this enough. If you are experiencing Cutscenes running fast, or Meatboy freaking out while standing still, just switch on VSync and you'll be fine. This is something we cannot fix since Graphics Drivers can choose to ignore developer settings. I tried artifically limiting the framerate today and honestly I didn't like how it looked. It wasn't as smooth as VSynced (obviously) so...just VSync it.

If your game is running slow or you are having slow load times, just do lowdetail and a lower resolution and you'll be fine. If my little Aspire One running XP can do it, we can all do it:)

[Small update on Load Times]
Thinking about it, the Atom has hyperthreading. I'm betting people with slow load times have single core non-hardward threaded processors. I'll look into this.

FOR TOMORROW

We didn't get the Non-Xbox 360 controller support in tonight because there were more pressing issues. It's next on my list though. I recently rewrote all of the input stuff (right around the time XBLA came out) and Direct Input got neglected. Sorry about that, but we will be supporting Direct Input controllers very very soon.

Mr. Minecraft crashes the game when chosen from the Character Select Menu. You can select him from the character select in game though.

There are various bugs with the new characters (VVVVVV, Naija, etc). These will all be addressed in the next update.

Game still crashes on Exit, this doesn't affect anything, won't corrupt a save, but yes, is annoying. Since it didn't break the gameplay of the game, I didn't address it this evening.

FINAL NOTES

Thanks to all the fans that sent us emails, Ed and I answered as many as I could (I did about 300 I think) and then got to work. I read every single one and if Ed or I don't respond, it doesn't mean we didn't see it. Doing two launches within a month is tough especially when your team consists of two people. I understand the frustration a lot of you are feeling but all I can ask is please be patient. Ed and I have been up all night trying to push a patch out that fixes issues that are preventing our fans from playing the game. Just bare with us, we're committed to getting it right. PC is not an afterthought, it was just developed on mine and Eds machines, I'm sure if we lived with all of you, all of your machines would run the game as well as ours. We'll all get there soon, I promise.